you belong to the
Up-to-Date Wood-choppers and have taken the josh degree in the Noble
Order of Prong-Horned Wapiti? Forget it. Those aren't initiations. They
are rest cures. I went into one of those societies which give horse-play
initiations for middle-aged daredevils last year and was bored to death
because I forgot to bring my knitting. They are stiff enough for fat
business men who never do anything more exciting than to fall over the
lawn mower in the cellar once a year; but, compared with a genuine,
eighteen-donkey-power college frat initiation with a Spanish Inquisition
attachment, the little degree teams, made up of grandfathers, feel like
a slap on the wrist delivered by a young lady in frail health.

Mind you, I'm not talking about the baby-ribbon affairs that the college
boys use nowadays. It doesn't seem to be the fashion to grease the
landscape with freshmen any more. Initiations are getting to be as safe
and sane as an ice-cream festival in a village church. When a frat wants
to submit a neophyte to a trying ordeal it sends him out on the campus
to climb a tree, or makes him go to a dance in evening clothes with a
red necktie on. A boy who can roll a peanut half a mile with a
toothpick, or can fish all morning in a pail of water in front of the
college chapel without getting mad and trying to thrash any one is
considered to be lion-hearted enough to ornament any frat. These are
mollycoddle times in all departments. I'm glad I'm out of college and am
catching street cars in the rush hours. That is about the only job left
that feels like the good old times in college when muscles were made to
jar some one else with.

Eight or ten years ago, when a college fraternity absorbed a freshman,
the job was worth talking about. There was no half-way business about
it. The freshman could tell at any stage of the game that something was
being done to him. They just ate him alive, that was all. Why, at
Siwash, where I was lap-welded into the Eta Bita Pies, any fraternity
which initiated a candidate and left enough of him to appear in chapel
the next morning was the joke of the school. Even the girls'
fraternities gave it the laugh. The girls used to do a little quiet
initiating themselves, and when they received a sister into membership
you could generally follow her mad career over the town by a trail of
hairpins, "rats" and little fragments of dressgoods.

Those were the days when the pledgling of a good high-press